Moon Landing Conspiracy: How did it Start?

Making a claim against something that has so much evidence, like the moon landing, is very difficult. What's more difficult is convincing other people to believe the extraordinary claim in the face of so much physical evidence. So who would lead this charge against one of the most well known events in human history? How did they go about convincing others? Why does it continue even when almost every claim made has been debunked? This page will try to answer these questions and others.

Bill Kaysing: The Man behind it all

Bill Kaysing (7/31/1922-4/21/2005) is credited by many people as the person who first started the moon landing hoax because of the book he wrote, We Never Went to the Moon. The book goes through his arguments about why he thinks we never went to the moon. Such as: photos looked faked, we didn't have the technology, we didn't have the money, and several others.

He worked at Rocketdyne as a major aerospace contractor for six years between 1957 and 1963. Rocketdyne built the main engines on several of the launch rockets for the Apollo shuttles but none of the electronics, computers, or anything actually having to do with the pod where the astronauts stayed. While there he worked his title was "service engineer" which was the equivalent to a mechanic (Clavius). But really he was more of a writer and a librarian. He claims to know all the secret projects they were working on there and that there was no way what they were building could fly to the moon. First off, his name only appears on three different projects that happened at Rocketdyne. Second, he didn't have nearly enough security clearance to see any "secret" plans that were going on at Rocketdyne. And lastly, what they were building at Rocketdyne wasn't suppose to fly to the moon, by its self. They were only making the initial lunch rockets not even parts of the space shuttle.

His book We Never Went to the Moon is used as a reference by everyone else claiming that we didn't go to the moon. His was the first published book about the subject and is therefore the base of all other arguments about us never going to the moon. Kaysing also devoted the second of his life to trying to prove that we never went to the moon, being his own biggest advocate. His major media appearance was in FOX's documentary about the moon landing "conspiracy".

He was so sensitive about his work that he trying suing a former astronaut for calling his claim "wacky". He tried suing James Lovell after Lovell wrote an article in which he mentioned that Kaysing's claim, that he was a liar and helping the government cover up the truth about the moon landing, was "wacky". Kaysing was suing because he thought Lovell hurt "his credibility and should pay for doing so" (Mechanic). Kaysing lost the court case and was order to pay Lovell's legal fees but Kaysing was already broke. (Mechanic) Kaysing said to Micheal Mechanic of Metroactive News & Issues, "If you're going to fight the government, you've got to get rid of all your possessions and money." This really shows how desperate Kaysing was to sue someone for supposedly hurting his credibility. This was the typical way Kaysing went about handling people who conflicted with his beliefs, he would lie more and try to get them to do something he could use against them.

Once Kaysing died in 2005 much of the support for the moon landing hoax was lost. There continues to be about 6% of people in the United States believe we never went to the moon. But when media covers it they always make it seem like many more people believe this claim.

The Infamous FOX Documentary

This is the full length FOX documentary about the supposed moon landing conspiracy. This might be a waste of 45 minutes to watch but if watched with a sense of humor it could be quite funny. It aired in 2001 and it goes through different aspects of supposed evidence to show why the moon landing was faked. It takes the normal approach to bad conspiracy shows on TV by asking many pointless questions and questions that have no answer. Overall this was very poorly written. The show used a lot of misinformation, misquoted people, and did a poor job of representing both sides of the argument equally.

One example of misquoting is of former astronaut Brain O'Leary. In the documentary O'Leary is portrayed as someone who used to work for NASA that thinks the moon landings were all a hoax. He went on to say later that the program took his words out of context. O'Leary doesn't actually believe the moon landings were faking, all he said was that some of the pictures taken look like they might be fake.

They also did a bad job showing all the evidence that shows that we actually did go to the moon. They picked out the weakest pieces of evidence and used crazy logic to prove that we didn't go to the moon. The people they interviewed from NASA were people that were already questioning if we went or not. And again the producers were able to edit what the experts said into something that sounded like they were unsure about us going to the moon.